wildscape. literary journal

12 stitches, 3 Our Father’s
by Samantha Backlund-Clapp

       There’s a blood red moon on the serengeti tonight, spotlighting down like a gunshot wound. Apex predators lick their young and so do the prey. There’s no blood red moon on the serengeti tonight, or maybe there is. I’m not there. I’m pumping gas at 2am trying not to step on the needles in my thin flip flops. Looking at an ad for rifles and pizza. Turning the same guitar riff over in my mind. I’m not there and you’re not here and nothing will ever be the same again. 
	Or, I’m on two wheels slicing the city in half, shouting at crows on my way home. There’s a half moon hanging over the bridge tonight, spotlighting down like a broken plate. I’m thinking about if I hadn’t had such a near miss 100 meters back, thinking about my right leg mutilated against the cement. Pinned down and crushed by cold metal. Bare bone tapping my watch strap. No ERs, no ambulances way out here. I’ll be shouting at the crows, bleeding out, completely numb. The sun will come up and the cameras will flock and my body will have been cold for hours. In my last moments I will have hiked my neck around to look straight up, marveling about the net in the sky, stretched out waiting to catch the stars.  
	Or, I’m ten years old reveling in the sanctity of the passenger seat, learning that when adults get a free ear and a stretch of highway, eventually they will all start talking about what keeps them up at night. They think that because I’m ten years old I don’t have my own things that keep me up at night. Grown ups seem big and brave until peeling out of a toll booth under the yellow of light pollution, telling you they’re afraid of hell, or that they got beat up in their youth, or that they think, secretly, that they’re very ugly. I’m ten years old but I’m a priest, absolving people of sins and assigning prayers and walking the stations of the cross. Everyone who has been in a car for more than twenty minutes with one other person (it must be only one other person) knows that it becomes a confessional booth. My dad cries, and my mom cries, and my brother fidgets and stops speaking in the same way I do, and I cry but only in the car alone, only behind the wheel, with the priest seat empty. I’m ten years old having to accept that you actually don’t grow out of anything, but I forgot about it from the ages of ten to twenty, which you do with everything important. 
	Because I only sat in the priest seat during my developmental years I don’t know how to be the confessor. 
	He brushed my hair once and it felt like the rapture. 
He kept saying all these words, holding the door open so it wouldn’t lock as I backed away and around the corner, he kept saying these words and stretching out his arm. I was pressing the elevator button and he was running overtime for his confessional. Overtime, and it was so awful I wanted to knock on the thin cedar door where he was knelt down repenting and instead of giving him a hail mary just ask him to fucking hit me. 

about the author // Samantha Backlund-Clapp